Sending Jobs to Dexter + Chaney Spectrum

Written by Brian Smithwick Updated this week

If you have an integration with Dexter + Chaney Spectrum, you can send jobs from ServiceTrade to Spectrum, where they become work orders. You can then use those work orders in Spectrum to record purchase orders, labor time, and other cost tracking.

IMPORTANT: Please note that Spectrum does not currently support syncing of customer or site (location) records via web services. To send a job to Spectrum as a work order, the ServiceTrade job's customer must already exist in Spectrum as a customer, the ServiceTrade job's location must already exist in Spectrum as a site, and both the customer and the location must be associated with their corresponding Spectrum records via ServiceTrade's external systems mappings.

To send a job to Spectrum, click on the Send menu at the top of the job page, then click the "Send Job to Spectrum" entry that corresponds to the Spectrum connection that you want to use. (Under most circumstances, you will have only one Spectrum connection, but it's possible to create multiple Spectrum integrations if your ServiceTrade account needs to integrate with multiple Spectrum instances).

If the sync is successful:

A work order in Spectrum will be created. The resulting work order number in Spectrum will be the job number from ServiceTrade, with a leading letter or number prepended to the job number, if you chose one in your Spectrum integration settings. For easy reference, the Spectrum external ID on the job will be set to be the Spectrum work order number. In the example below, the letter 'T' was configured to be the leading character, so that letter is added to the beginning of the job number.

The work order in Spectrum will be assigned to the Spectrum customer that is associated with the ServiceTrade job's customer, and to the Spectrum site that is associated with the ServiceTrade job's location. If the ServiceTrade job has a contract AND that contract is associated with a contract in Spectrum, then the Spectrum work order will also be assigned to that contract.

If the ServiceTrade job has a description, it will be used to set the Spectrum work order's summary description. If the ServiceTrade job has a customer PO number, it will be used to set the Spectrum work order's customer PO number.

IMPORTANT: Please note that it is possible to send the same job to Spectrum as many times as you wish. However, if you manually make edits to a work order field (such as the customer PO number or summary description) that ServiceTrade updates, and then send the job from ServiceTrade again, your manual changes to the work order will be OVERWRITTEN and the information from the ServiceTrade job will be set on the Spectrum work order.

Job items and appointment scheduling details are NOT currently synced to Spectrum through this process. However, you can choose to sync Material and Other Charge items to Spectrum during job completion in ServiceTrade.

IMPORTANT: Labor job items are never synced to Spectrum. You must enter labor utilization details into Spectrum directly.

IMPORTANT: If you complete a job and sync Material and Other Charge items to the Spectrum work order, then reopen that job and complete it again (and choose to sync Material and Other Charge items a second time), two sets of items will be created in Spectrum. Take care when re-completing a job that has already been completed and synced to Spectrum.

If the sync fails:

A comment with details about the failure is added to the job, and a warning appears on the ServiceTrade dashboard. More information about common sync failure errors that you may experience, and instructions for fixing them, are in this support article.